The Dynamic Life of Lorraine Hansberry

New documentary "Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart" shows that the beloved writer is far more than just one play.

By
Danielle Jackson

Jan 19, 2018

Shondaland

Here is what I can remember about Lorraine Hansberry with relative ease: She wrote "A Raisin in the Sun," the first play by a black woman produced on Broadway. Nina Simone wrote the gospel hymn "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" about her. In photographs, Hansberry was the epitome of 60s intellectual chic; all smoldering black cool, with sunglasses, a press and curl, pearls around her neck, a cigarette.

If I try harder and probe the depths of my mind where purposefully taught insights live, I can remember she died young. I know that in high school, a beloved teacher introduced me to Beneatha Younger (the daughter character in "Raisin"). Beneatha's youthful angst and blooming black consciousness made all the difference when I was hoping to find a place for myself in theater. Still, these are just dotted lines, sketches of a life. While people don't always articulate the lives or lessons of Dr. King, Malcolm X, or DuBois accurately, they are at least widely discussed and known to be titans of the struggle for black freedom in the United States. The new film "Sighted Eyes / Feeling Heart," directed with skill and fervor by documentarian Tracy Strain, makes the case for Hansberry’s inclusion in that pantheon of change makers.

Strain turns the dotted lines and sketches of Hansberry's life into a full portraits.

The playwright's story begins in 1930 on Chicago's South Side, with narration from actresses Anika Noni Rose and Latanya Richardson set against beautiful stills of early 20th century Chicago. Cities of the north, midwest, and west coast became home to migrants fleeing terror in the rural south for economic opportunity and freedom of mobility, and Hansberry's family was in that number. In Chicago, the family amassed a fortune in real estate investments and rented out small tenement style apartments to the striving working class who flooded the city. They were a civically engaged and connected family – her father, Carl, was secretary of the local NAACP. In 1937, the family bought a home in the white Woodlawn neighborhood, and the Hansberrys became one of the first black families to move in. Their home was attacked by white mobs, and a local court ruling made the Hansberrys leave, citing housing covenants that had been on the books since 1916. Carl Hansberry appealed his case to the Supreme Court in "Hansberry v. Lee," and though he prevailed, little changed in Chicago for many years.

Disenchanted, Carl moved to Mexico City and died before the entire family could join him. Lorraine was 15 then, he was only 50. She was convinced for the rest of her life that her father died from the dogging fatigue of fighting racism (a symptom of America we saw manifest publicly again, in 2017, when Erica Garner passed away). Strain covers this early period in Hansberry's life in exacting detail, since it is this lived experience of striving, black Chicago that the artist captures in "A Raisin in the Sun." Struggle, angst, and a sense of suffocation underpin the play, and Strain's documentary suggests that Hansberry knew these things intimately, and these early experiences formed the basis for Hansberry's eventual intellectual progression and her inclination towards using her artistic practice to provoke progress.

Lorraine Hansberry in 1959.

Getty ImagesDavid Attie

Lorraine enrolled in college in Wisconsin, left after two years for Harlem, and began writing for the radical black leftist newspaper, "Freedom." Her curiosity had breadth — she wrote about the unfurling of colonialism in Ghana and Kenya, Hollywood stereotypes, the plight of American women. She found a community of artists and activists, joining the Communist Party and Labor Youth League, and married Robert Nemiroff, a radical Jewish grad student. Eventually, Hansberry came to realize that heterosexual marriage didn't do it for her. She dated women and wrote about lesbianism in publications often under a pseudonym at a time when outed heterosexual couples could be arrested for indecency.

Strain finds Hansberry's story in the essays, articles, plays, and fiction she wrote, in letters to friends and intimates, but also in images from her private life. There is tranquil footage of her wedding to Nemiroff and shots of her at home in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. The moving images of Hansberry in domesticity give a fleeting glimpse of what it was like to be around her. Strain told me she and her team "traveled to archives, libraries," combed through public and private collections, newspapers and magazines, and also used material acquired by the Lorraine Hansberry Properties Trust. Altogether, Strain said, their project's archive has "records for 7,465 stills and 2,185 footage and audio recordings." Work on the film took fourteen years.

Louis Gossett Jr., who made his Broadway debut in "Raisin," says Hansberry had "fire, intelligence, and anger" about the social issues she addressed so stridently in her work. In the foreword to Hansberry's adapted autobiography "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," Baldwin calls her a "small, shy determined person." Imani Perry, professor of African American studies at Princeton, whose book "Looking for Lorraine: A Life of Lorraine Hansberry" will be out in September, featured prominently in the film and told me in an email exchange that Hansberry was "a queer Black woman, a radical leftist, a feminist, an anti-colonialist, a freedom fighter, and a writer," at a time when those were contested identities. She lived a life of integrity and meaning, staying true to herself, sometimes at great peril. She kept up her work, refining and sharpening her ideas even when her health began to fail. At her Harlem funeral, Paul Robeson eulogized her, Baldwin sent a telegram, and King delivered a quote: "Her creative literary ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn."

She lived a life of integrity and meaning, staying true to herself, sometimes at great peril.

Everyone whom Strain includes in the film enhance the tapestry of Hansberry's life, and that is no easy feat. Recent documentaries about Lorraine's contemporaries and friends Nina Simone and James Baldwin seemed to advance specific points of view. "What Happened Miss Simone?" worked hard to show how Simone's career was difficult for her daughter; "I Am Not Your Negro" emphasized Baldwin's life as a public figure. "Sighted Eyes / Feeling Heart"'s guiding ethos seems to be completeness. Strain turns the dotted lines and sketches of Hansberry's life into full portraits.

Lorraine Hansberry lived her life in defiance of what Toni Morrison called the "distraction" of racism. Tracy Strain's documentary captures just how much Hansberry loved her people and the ways in which cast her lot with the suffering. She was a woman and an artist who carved a path for how we all might hold onto ourselves, our work, and each other through our own difficult times. In this piece, Strain has painted a beautiful mosaic that makes room for the highlights of Hansberry's journey — the first showing of "Raisin in the Sun" and the near universal critical acclaim it received — but also pauses, offering meditative moments for the audience's quiet reflection.

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